Ken Edwards was born in Gibraltar in 1950, went to King's College London in 1968, where he studied under the late Eric Mottram, and lived in London until 2004, when he moved with his wife Elaine to Hastings. From 1993 to 2017 he ran Reality Street, which was formed through the amalgamation of his own Reality Studios imprint with Wendy Mulford's Street Editions.

Ken has also been involved in composing and performing music since the early 1990s. Currently he plays bass guitar and sings with The Moors and Afrit Nebula, bands he co-founded with Elaine Edwards.

His publications, in addition to the Shearsman titles listed below, include the novels Futures (Reality Street, 1998), Country Life (Unthank Books, 2015) and The Grey Area (Grand Iota, 2020), a book of short fictions, Down With Beauty (Reality Street, 2013), a memoir of the 1970s, Wild Metrics (Grand Iota, 2019) and Bardo (Knives Forks & Spoons Press, 2011).